About JD Vance, an intelligent, complex, flawed person

LGBQT Nation writes about JD Vance:

J.D. Vance’s former trans friend speaks out 

about how he turned hateful

He delivered baked goods to his trans friend after their gender-affirming surgery. Now he's calling LGBTQ+ people "groomers"

“It hurt my feelings when he started saying hateful things about trans people,” said Sofia Nelson, a former classmate of Vance at Yale Law School.

They were reportedly close friends, with their friendship continuing after Vance graduated in 2013, but this ended when Vance supported an Arkansas bill that restricted transgender care for minors in 2021.

He had another classmate at Yale who has since cut ties with him – Josh McLaurin, a Democratic state senator from Georgia. The two stayed in touch up until when Trump first ran for president. Vance reportedly told McLaurin on Facebook, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

“He realized that the only way that he could realize and give effect to his own anger in politics was to identify with the MAGA movement,” McLaurin said to the Times.

The cynicism of MAGA elites cannot be easily overstated. These people are driven by wealth and power lust, rage, hate, bigotry and moral cynicism to the point of nihilism. But try to square my allegation of cynicism with these parts of a fascinating much longer essay that Vance wrote for The Lamp, a Catholic blog in 2020:

HOW I JOINED THE RESISTANCE

As I advanced through our educational hierarchy—moving on from Ohio State to Yale Law School—I began to worry that my assimilation into elite culture came at a high cost. My sister once told me that the song that made her think of me was “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Though I had fallen in love, I found that the emotional demons of my childhood made it hard to be the type of partner I’d always wanted to be. My Randian arrogance about my own ability melted away when confronted with the realization that an obsession with achievement would fail to produce the achievement that mattered most to me for so much of my life: a happy, thriving family.

I had immersed myself in the logic of the meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying. And I began to wonder: were all these worldly markers of success actually making me a better person? I had traded virtue for achievement and found the latter wanting. But the woman I wanted to marry cared little whether I obtained a Supreme Court clerkship. She just wanted me to be a good person.

Around the same time, I attended a talk at our law school with Peter Thiel. This was 2011, and Thiel was a well-known venture capitalist but hardly a household name. He would later blurb my book and become a good friend, but I had no idea what to expect at the time. He spoke first in personal terms: arguing that we were increasingly tracked into cutthroat professional competitions. We would compete for appellate clerkships, and then Supreme Court clerkships. We would compete for jobs at elite law firms, and then for partnerships at those same places. At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness. He also argued that his own world of Silicon Valley spent too little time on the technological breakthroughs that made life better—those in biology, energy, and transportation—and too much on things like software and mobile phones. Everyone could now tweet at each other, or post photos on Facebook, but it took longer to travel to Europe, we had no cure for cognitive decline and dementia, and our energy use increasingly dirtied the planet. He saw these two trends—elite professionals trapped in hyper-competitive jobs, and the technological stagnation of society—as connected. If technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn’t feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes.

Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School. He articulated a feeling that had until then remained unformed: that I was obsessed with achievement in se—not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition. My worry that I had prioritized striving over character took on a heightened significance: striving for what? I didn’t even know why I cared about the things I cared about. I fancied myself educated, enlightened, and especially wise about the ways of the world—at least compared with most of the people from my hometown. Yet I was obsessed with obtaining professional credentials—a clerkship with a federal judge and then an associate position at a prestigious firm—that I didn’t understand. I hated my limited exposure to legal practice. I looked to the future, and realized that I’d been running a desperate race where the first prize was a job I hated.

I began immediately planning for a career outside the law, which is why I spent less than two years after graduation as a practicing attorney. But Peter left me with one more thing: he was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, but he was also a Christian. He defied the social template I had constructed—that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists. I began to wonder where his religious belief came from, which led me to René Girard, the French philosopher whom he apparently studied under at Stanford.

One of Girard’s central insights is that human civilizations are often, perhaps even always, founded on a “scapegoat myth”—an act of violence committed against someone who has wronged the broader community, retold as a sort of origin story for the community.

Girard points out that Romulus and Remus are, like Christ, divine children, and, like Moses, placed in a river basket to save them from a jealous king. There was a time when I bristled at such comparisons, worried than any seeming lack of originality on the part of Scripture meant that it couldn’t be true. This is a common rhetorical device of the New Atheists: point to some creation story—like the flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh—as evidence that the sacred authors have plagiarized their story from some earlier civilization. It reasonably follows that if the biblical story is lifted from somewhere else, the version in the Bible may not be the Word of God after all.

The victim of the madness of crowds is, as Christ was, infinitely powerful—able to prevent his own murder—and perfectly innocent—undeserving of the rage and violence of the crowd. In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.

These very personal reflections on faith, conformity, and virtue coincided with a writing project that would eventually become a very public success: Hillbilly Elegy, the hybrid book of memoir and social commentary I published in 2016. I look back on earlier drafts of the book, and realize just how much I changed from 2013 to 2015: I started the book angry, resentful of my mother, especially, and confident in my own abilities. I finished it a little humbled, and very unsure about what to do to “solve” so many of our social problems. And the answer I landed on, as unsatisfactory then as it is now, is that you can’t actually “solve” our social problems. The best you can hope for is to reduce them or to blunt their effects.

I noticed during my research that many of those social problems came from behavior for which social scientists and policy experts had a different vocabulary. On the right, the conversation often turned to “culture” and “personal responsibility”—the ways in which individuals or communities held back their own progress. And though it seemed obvious to me that there was something dysfunctional about some of the places in which I’d grown up, the discourse on the right seemed a little heartless. It failed to account for the fact that destructive behaviors were almost always tragedies with terrible consequences. It is one thing to wag your finger at another person for failing to act a certain way, but it is something else to feel the weight of the misery that comes from those actions.

The left’s intellectuals focused much more on the structural and external problems facing families like mine—the difficulty in finding jobs and the lack of funding for certain types of resources. And while I agreed that more resources were often necessary, there seemed to me a sense in which our most destructive behaviors persisted—even flourished—in times of material comfort. The economic left was often more compassionate, but theirs was a kind of compassion—devoid of any expectation—that reeked of giving up. A compassion that assumes a person is disadvantaged to the point of hopelessness is like sympathy for a zoo animal, and I had no use for it.

And as I reflected on these competing views of the world, and the wisdom and shortcomings of each, I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties; one that could speak against rising rates of divorce and addiction, not as sanitized conclusions about their negative social externalities, but with moral outrage. And I realized, eventually, that I had already been exposed to that worldview: it was my Mamaw’s Christianity. And the name it gave for the behaviors I had seen destroy lives and communities was “sin.”

A decade ago, I took this as evidence of a vengeful, irrational God. Yet who could look at the statistics on what our early twenty-first century culture and politics had wrought—the misery, the rising suicide rates, the “deaths of despair” in the richest country on earth, and doubt that the sins of parents had any effect on their children? 

This is a passage from City of God, where St. Augustine summarizes the debauchery of Rome’s ruling class:

This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquility; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependents, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear. .... If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced, banished, put an end to.

It was the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read. A society oriented entirely towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue. Not long after I first read these words, my friend Oren Cass published a book arguing that American policy makers have focused far too much on promoting consumption as opposed to productivity, or some other measure of wellbeing. The reaction—criticizing Oren for daring to push policies that might lower consumption—almost proved the argument. “Yes,” I found myself saying, “Oren’s preferred policies might reduce per-capita consumption. But that’s precisely the point: our society is more than the sum of its economic statistics. If people die sooner in the midst of historic levels of consumption, then perhaps our focus on consumption is misguided.”

And indeed it was this insight, more than any other, that ultimately led not just to Christianity, but to Catholicism. Despite my Mamaw’s unfamiliarity with the liturgy, the Roman and Italian cultural influences, and the foreign pope, I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of her kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive. And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily. (emphases added)

Three thoughts

1. Try squaring Vance’s 2020 essay with the Vance the 2024 LGBQT article talks about. On the one hand Vance (i) points to the “scapegoat myth” that Girard articulated as a fundamental insight, (ii) says God loves unconditionally and forgives easily, (iii) openly admits his own failings, but then he (iv) publicly attacks, insults and slanders the LGBQT community as evil “groomers.” What is going on in that man’s mind? Is he a cynical Christian nationalist scapegoating LGBQT people in an insane drive for wealth and power, an imperative he criticizes? Or, is he an old-fashioned Christian like his Mamaw? Or, is he just very confused? 

2. I am struck by how similar my thinking about some of these things has been to the journey that Vance took. I never had the complication of any urge toward any form of religion. My mental path was different that way, but pretty similar otherwise. Vance says he was desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual and structural and moral. I do wish that Vance had somehow become aware of pragmatic rationalism. It is a worldview that understands that human bad behavior is both simultaneously social and individual, and moral (maybe also structural depending on what he means by structural).

3. Not all religious people are stupid. Some are brilliant, probably most are average. I have argued that many times here. This essay make that clear. No one can accuse Vance of being stupid or carelessly self-deluded. He knows exactly what he is doing and why. That is how I see the elites behind the MAGA movement. I see them as cynical aggressively opportunistic people with an intense lust for wealth and power and fundamentally different from most (~95% ?) of the rank and file MAGA. So, is Vance a cynic and/or something else?

A retraction of yesterday's poll post; The wheels are falling off the rule of law cart

I retract the poll data I posted yesterday from 538. That data gave Biden a 53% chance of winning. Nate Silver, formerly at 538, explains the problem with the model that 538 is using:

When the Silver Bulletin presidential forecast launched last month, I said I wasn’t interested in prosecuting the “model wars”, meaning having big public debates about forecasting methodology. One reason is that I find these arguments tiresome: I first published an election model in 2008, and it’s been the same debates pretty much ever since. But there’s also a more pragmatic consideration. If I think a model is unsound, I worry about elevating it by giving it even more attention. Because I do believe in probabilities, after all. Joe Biden’s chance of winning another term is hard to forecast because (1) he might still drop out and (2) he’s probably not capable of running the sort of normal campaign the model implicitly assumes he can. Biden’s chances are probably lower than the current 28 percent in the Silver Bulletin forecast, in other words. But they’re certainly not zero. I worry about a news cycle on Nov. 6 when an unsound model is validated because it “won” the model wars based on a sample size of one election.

What also makes this awkward is that the model I’m going to criticize comes from the site I used to work for, 538. I’m sure newsletter readers will know this, but what was formerly the FiveThirtyEight model1 from 2008-2022 is now the Silver Bulletin model — I retained the IP when I left Disney. But, I’m not sure the rest of the world knows that. (I still sometimes run into people who think FiveThirtyEight is affiliated with the New York Times, which it hasn’t been since 2013.) I worry a little bit about a Naomi Klein / Naomi Wolf situation in which criticism of the 538 model rebounds back on me.

Let’s also state the other and more obvious conflicts here: I publish a competing product. And I’m not a fan of the guy 538 hired to develop its new model, G. Elliott Morris.

However, various high-profile reporters have contacted me for comment. And I think I have a professional obligation to speak up. Not all that many people have explored the inner workings of models like these. Moreover, we’re in an unusual circumstance where the models themselves have become part of the debate about what Biden should do. For instance, the 538 model — which showed Biden with a 53 percent chance of winning as of Thursday afternoon — has been cited by Biden defenders like Ron Klain, the former White House Chief of Staff, as a reason that Biden should stay in the race: ....

I’m not sure that Klain or anyone else should get their hopes up from the 538 model, however. At best, all it’s really saying is that Biden will probably win because he’s an incumbent: the polls have very little influence on the 538 forecast at this point. And at worst, it might be buggy. It’s not easy to understand what it’s doing or why it’s doing it.

I thought the 538 model seemed basically reasonable when it was first published in June, showing the race as a toss-up. But its behavior since the debate — Biden has actually gained ground in their forecast over the past few weeks even though their polling average has moved toward Trump by 2 points! — raises a lot of questions. This may be by design — Morris seems to believe it’s too early to really look at the polls at all. But If my model was behaving like this, I’d be concerned.

Moreover, some of the internal workings of the model are strange, or at least appear that way based on the information Morris has made publicly available.

I retract this 

The prediction model is possibly flawed

The rest of Nate’s long post is fascinating about weighing poll data vs two fundamentals (incumbency and the economy), but not necessary to explain my retraction.

This prediction model kerfuffle raises a question. Based on my limited knowledge about the science of prediction probably being a ridiculously dangerous thing, is predicting a presidential election outcome fundamentally different than predicting other events? This prediction model flaw issue makes no sense to me unless presidential elections are fundamentally different than other kinds of events. 

We all recall my wonderful blog post blithering about the predictive power of a moderately sophisticated algorithm called autoregressive distributed lag. Don’t recall it? Well, it’s here if you’re interested. It did really well at predicting future events compared to both human experts and confident blowhards who make their living telling the public false predictions about basically everything. We live in strange times.

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From the What Fresh Hell is This Now? Files: The AP reports the most amazing, mind-blowing thing about Hunter Biden one could ever imagine -- Aileen Cannon has bailed him out of his federal legal troubles 😮:

Hunter Biden seeks dismissal of tax, gun cases, 

citing decision to toss Trump’s classified docs case

President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, asked federal judges on Thursday to dismiss tax and gun cases against him, citing a ruling in Florida this week that threw out a separate prosecution of former President Donald Trump.

The requests in federal court in Delaware and California underscore the potential ramifications of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s dismissal Monday of the classified documents case against Trump and the possibility that it could unsettle the legal landscape surrounding Justice Department special counsels.

Both Hunter Biden and Trump were prosecuted by special counsels appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. In dismissing the Trump case, Cannon ruled that the appointment of the special counsel who prosecuted Trump, Jack Smith, violated the Constitution because he was appointed directly to the position by Garland instead of being nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.  

In a pair of filings Thursday, lawyers for Hunter Biden said the same logic should apply in his cases and should result in the dismissal of a pending tax prosecution in Los Angeles — currently set for trial in September — and a separate firearm case in Delaware, in which Hunter Biden was convicted in June of three felony charges.

Presumably, the judge on Hunter’s federal lawsuit is a normal, actual judge, not a loose Republican Party cannon like Aileen. In that case, the judge would reject Hunter’s plea and his prosecution would probably carry on. His attorneys will probably appeal to the local federal appeals court and they might apply for a stay of prosecution until the legal question is ultimately resolved by the US supreme court in a year or two (or maybe three). Hunter, like DJT will probably die of old age before the courts figure out what the hell is going on with the rule of law.

Our legal system has degenerated into a stupid fustercluck. What a mess.

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The New Republic reports that Republican racists are raising a ruckus -- Rut Roh!:

MAGA Enters Racist Meltdown Mode 

Over J.D. Vance’s Wife

The past week has seen an outpouring of hate from the far right over the wife of Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance. The unremarkable fact that Vance is married to Usha Vance, a woman of Indian heritage, has become a fixation for white nationalists online.

Following Monday’s announcement of Vance as Trump’s running mate, white nationalist “groyper” Nick Fuentes seemed to enter a meltdown on his broadcast, saying, “What kind of man marries somebody that isn’t a Christian? What kind of man marries somebody named Usha? Clearly, he doesn’t value his racial identity, his heritage. Clearly, he doesn’t value his religion. He doesn’t marry a woman that professes Jesus Christ? What does that say about him?”

Jaden McNeil, another white nationalist activist, posted a picture of Vance, his wife, and their newborn with the caption, “I’m sure this guy is going to be great on immigration.” Other prominent far-right accounts have similarly bemoaned Vance’s multiracial family, with replies awash in bigotry. “There is an obvious Indian coup taking place in the US right before our eyes,” whined far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters.

Considering the flagrant racism of the far right, this reaction may not shock, but it certainly appalls. [Well said, if I do say so myself!] It’s a reminder that there are factions of Trump’s base that view diversity in their party, and the country, with horror. (Recall Ann Coulter telling Vivek Ramaswamy that she would not vote for him because he is Indian.)

It’s good to know that most of America’s bigots, racists, misogynists, pedophiles, perverts, crackpots, creeps, cranks and Christian theocrats are now comfortably ensconced in the radical authoritarian, morally rotted Republican Party. Wheee!! What great fun. 

Q: What the hell is a groyper? 

Lest we forget, or never knew, here are some patriotic Trump supporters:

A short history of Christianity in America & Christian nationalism

Until recent years, Christianity never bothered me much. It was always there but it mostly existed in peace and cooperation with things other than religious worship and practices. Despite the decline in Christian practice in the US in recent decades, the rise of radicalized authoritarian Christian nationalism has made me uneasy ever since I came to learn of its existence and power in American politics. In the last couple of years, my unease has turned into increasingly intense fear.

Christian nationalism is a political wealth and power movement, not a Christian religious movement. Nonetheless, the elites who control the movement use strict Christian fundamentalist dogmas to shield the wealth and power agenda from the rank and file. Poll data indicates that most rank and file Christian nationalism supporters do not know what Christian nationalism is or that its agenda is anti-democratic authoritarian wealth and power for the elites, not Christian religion for the benefit of all.

This 21 minute video outlines the origins and practices of Christianity in the US since the time of the colonies. In the past, educational content like this would not have fazed me. Now all of it scares me. I look differently at history that was never troubling until now. 

Faithful America, a Christian group that opposes Christian nationalism writes about the authoritarian threat.

What is Christian nationalism, and why is it a threat?

As defined by multiple sociologists and academic researchers, Christian nationalism is a political ideology and cultural framework that claims America was founded to be a "Christian nation" where Christians should receive special legal treatment not available to non-Christians. This merges the previously separate Christian and American identities, proclaiming that the only true Americans are the country's Christians (and a specific subset of conservative Christians, at that). This means that Christian nationalism is antisemitic and Islamophobic, and poses a threat to the religious freedom of America's Jews, Muslims, Indigenous peoples, mainline Protestant Christians, and more.

As the "Christians Against Christian Nationalism" coalition notes, "It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation," which is why you will also often hear the related and important term "white Christian nationalism." Christian nationalism also falsely teaches that there is no separation of church and state -- and that conservative Christians should seize complete power by any means necessary.

Driven by that lust for power, Christian nationalism is the ideology that inspired and guided the deadly January 6 insurrection; organizes countless attacks on the equal rights and religious freedom of non-Christians, immigrants, women, the LGBTQ community, people of color, and other Americans; and now threatens to incite a new wave of political violence with never-ending rhetoric about "holy war," the "armor of God," and "the angel of death" coming for the movement's political opponents. 

Is Christian nationalism Christian?

No, Christian nationalism is a political ideology and a form of nationalism, not a religion or a form of Christianity. It directly contradicts the Gospel in multiple ways, and is therefore considered by many Christian leaders to be a heresy. While Jesus taught love, peace, and truth, Christian nationalism leads to hatred, political violence, and QAnon misinformation. While Jesus resisted the devil's temptations of authority in the wilderness, Christian nationalism seeks to seize power for its followers at all costs. And while Christianity is a 2,000-year-old global tradition that transcends all borders, Christian nationalism seeks to merge faith with a single, 247-year-old, pluralistic nation.

If Christian nationalism is a political ideology, not a religion, why call it "Christian?"

We still say "Christian nationalism" because, just as white nationalism seeks to define national citizenship by a particular race, Christian nationalism seeks to define national citizenship by a particular religion. We need to note which faith is being hijacked -- our faith -- in order to highlight the danger to the church as well as to explain why we are the ones speaking out.

Equally importantly, while the ideology of Christian nationalism isn't Christian, individual Christian nationalists are. We should not question anyone else's stated faith or relationship with God the way that some of our own critics have questioned us. Instead, it is precisely because we are their fellow Christians that we can say to the pastors and politicians who abuse their power, "This is not what our shared faith is supposed to look like. This hunger for power and this mistreatment of others is not the love that Jesus wants from us." 

Why should Christians oppose Christian nationalism?

Pro-democracy, pro-love Christians must speak out together to show the country that Christian nationalism does not represent Jesus or our faith. When we do this, we prove that the biggest critics of the Christian-nationalist ideology are in fact Christians, and thus disprove the source of its biggest power: the false perception that the religious-right speaks for all American Christians.

Scared of losing this power, Christian-nationalist leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Michael Flynn, and Tony Perkins have worked very hard to convince their followers of the lie that all critics of Christian nationalist are "atheistic globalists" from "the godless left" who want to "marginalize" Christians. Others, like Franklin Graham, warn that "progressive Christianity will lead you to hell." They are desperate to sideline or silence our voices, but their backlash simply shows that speaking out for the Gospel's message of love works.

In reality, it is Christian nationalism that marginalizes the Black Church tradition, mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, progressive evangelicals, and millions of other members of the Body of Christ by trying to erase our faith and our relationship to the public square. To assist such Christians and churches in recognizing and responding to Christian nationalism when we see it, Faithful America has compiled the following list of helpful resources.

Some Christian nationalist rhetoric and thinking:

“Mercy is more than undeserved kindness. It is either a full pardon from a crime you are guilty of committing or it is a stay of execution.” ― Lance Wallnau (a major Christian nationalist advocate), God’s Chaos Code: The Shocking Blueprint that Reveals 5 Keys to the Destiny of Nations

“The fact that companies are as influential as nations should reshape how we see corporations. Nations now compete with corporations for influence and political power.” ― Lance Wallnau, God’s Chaos Code: The Shocking Blueprint that Reveals 5 Keys to the Destiny of Nations (Here is where a fight between the autocrats and the plutocrats against the theocrats could come from - how the three power sources will reconcile their endless lust for wealth and power is not at all clear to me)

Christian Ethics,Volume 33, page 26,

Number 1,   Aggregate Issue 127, Winter 2023

538 poll update; Military justice; MAGA injustice and bigoted hate; About Biden

Poll update from 538:

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Vice reports: 

An Army Officer Faced Jail Time for Spying on Girls. 

Then the Pentagon Stepped In. 

Lt. Col. Jacob Sweatland faced a year in jail until a civilian court gave his case to the DoD. An Army merely reprimanded him and now his court records are sealed. 

A special court martial handed down a reprimand to an Army lieutenant colonel who was caught putting cameras in the dressing room of a clothing store by a 16-year-old girl. The Lt. Col., who fled from police when caught, pleaded guilty but will serve no jail time.

The slap on the wrist comes after civilian prosecutors initially attempted to pursue a criminal conviction. The Army convinced the court to let it handle the matter internally, however, and the officer was instead prosecuted through the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (UCMJ). Further, Motherboard found while seeking records related to the case that the court documents have since been sealed.  

In September 2022, Sweatland left a key fob with a hidden camera in it at a PacSun in San Luis Obispo. A 16-year-old girl found the camera and turned it in, and the store called the cops.

The cops took a look at the camera and found it still contained images and video from other dressing rooms in the area. Sweatland later called the store asking if anyone had found his key fob. The clerk, who was working with police, told Sweatland that someone had found it and he could come and retrieve it. The cops were waiting at the scene.

It is time to cut the military budget.

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NBC reports that the radical authoritarian MAGA movement has locked onto female secret service agents. MAGA monsters are attacking and blaming DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) wokeness for female agents that are incompetent, weak and unfit for duty. As usual, social media is spreading MAGA lies, hate and poison. NBC writes:

Posts criticizing the female agents still spread widely. The account Libs of TikTok received more than 10 million views on a post criticizing the female agents and saying “DEI got someone killed.”

Chaya Raichik, who runs the account, declined to comment further and, in an email she posted on X, said that a reporter was “mentally challenged” for asking.

The pro-Republican account @grandoldmemes altered a photo of a female Secret Service agent to make her appear as if she’s washing dishes instead of protecting Trump. It received 1.5 million views in less than 24 hours after it was posted Sunday. And it received another 600,000 views when it was reshared by the influential conservative account @catturd2.

Neither @grandoldmemes nor @catturd2 responded to requests for comment.

The arguments weren’t only on X. On Instagram, a similar post received more than 1,000 likes arguing that female Secret Service agents would be better off “in the kitchen” making sandwiches. And on YouTube, a video from the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sky News Australia called out the “fumbling fumbelinas” protecting Trump. Neither of those outlets responded to requests for comment Tuesday.

The argument spread widely. By late Monday, a wave of conservative pundits on social media had weighed in against diversity in the Secret Service including Mike Cernovich, Christopher Rufo, Ian Miles Cheong, Matt Walsh, Jake Shields, Candace Owens, Benny Johnson and the account @EndWokeness.

Owens stood by her criticism in a statement sent through a spokesperson: “Women have literally no role in the physical protection of men. It’s that simple. It’s basic biology.”

Rufo elaborated in a column he published Monday, saying the female agents lacked the “poise, confidence, and strength” of their male colleagues.

Tesla CEO and billionaire X owner Elon Musk added fuel to the idea that Trump’s security detail was physically inadequate. Musk, who endorsed Trump immediately after the shooting, posted Monday on X that bodyguards could be men or women but that they should be “large enough to do the job.” He cited the fictional warrior Brienne of Tarth, made famous by the television series “Game of Thrones.” Many of the replies to Musk called for banning women entirely. X did not respond to a request for comment from Musk.

Nowadays, MAGA’s blind, irrational, fact- and logic-free hate, intolerance and bigotry are all right out in the open. The misogyny here is undeniable. This is what America’s authoritarian radical right wealth and power movement has led us into. 

But we can all rest assured that the wealth and power elites will not face much or any of the blind, irrational, fact-free hate, intolerance and bigotry they have forced on the rest of us. Those elites have something about as good as the secret service to protect themselves. They have wealth and power. They can buy their own secret service and make it all big gnarly men.

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The Independent reports:

President Joe Biden held a call with moderate Democrats that was “even worse than the debate” just an hour before the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump on Saturday, it has been revealed.

The report by Puck citing people on the Zoom call comes as House Democratic heavyweight and California Senate nominee Adam Schiff called on Biden to step aside on Wednesday.

Like in the debate, Biden is reported to have lost his train of thought during the Zoom call with moderate Democrats. One anonymous source told Puck that had the assassination attempt not taken place, as many as “50 people on that Zoom were ready to come out publicly against him.” 

One person who took part in the conversation [Adam Schiff] told the outlet, “The call was even worse than the debate. He was rambling – he’d start an answer then lose his train of thought, then would just say ‘whatever.’ I lost a ton of respect for him.”  

Schiff came out against the president running for re-election on Wednesday saying in a statement that Biden “has been one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history, and his lifetime of service as a Senator, a Vice President, and now as President has made our country better,” according to The Los Angeles Times.

If that reporting about Biden’s lack of coherence is correct, then it truly is time for him to step down. The Dem Party has lied to and betrayed us. The MSM failed to see through the lies and betrayal and thus the MSM failed us. I think now that Biden probably will step aside. We can only hope it isn’t too late.

But as bad as Biden’s mental situation is, DJT’s is much worse. In terms of (i) moral unfitness for office, (ii) his openly treasonous anti-democracy, pro-kleptocratic dictatorship temperament, and (iii) his staunch insistence on constantly lying to us to deceive, divide and distract us from what he really is and stands for, DJT still is the worse candidate. 

What a fracking mess.

Now what?

Well, it appears to be over for Joe.  I see the flood gates have officially opened, with all the top Dem brass in congress laying it on the line for him.  “We will lose the House and Senate if he stays in.”

He looked so frail going up those stairs in Vegas yesterday.  Covid again, and its effects show.  But, what a trooper!  Best wishes Mr. President. 

Yeah, now what?

Well, if they pass by Harris and go for someone else, that’s sure to piss off the Blacks and the women.  Bad, bad move.  That would be a suicide mission.

So, assuming it’s Harris who takes over the asylum, ‘er, I mean the reins, who will be her second?  

The floor is open for nominations.  Make yours below.

(by PrimalSoup)

More about polls and statistics; Aileen Cannon commentary

A post at r/fivethirtyeight discusses why some recent polls were wrong and why the election in 2024 is uncertain. The uncertainty mostly boils down to poll data indicating that 17.4% of poll respondents are still undecided or supporting 3rd party candidates. 

It was brought to my attention yesterday just how different the 2020 and 2024 presidential polling averages are.

On this day in 2020, Biden and Trump were polling nationally at 50.3% and 41.2% respectively, a 9.1 point difference. By comparison, today Trump is leading 42.5% to 40.1%, a 2.4 point difference.

What's most interesting to me are that at this point in 2020, only 8.5% of poll respondents were undecided or supporting 3rd party candidates, compared with 17.4% of poll respondents this cycle. In other words, more than twice as many respondents in 2024 haven't made up their minds yet with the vast majority of them seemingly up for grabs.

This introduces a large degree of uncertainty that I don't see getting discussed much all things considered. In fact, the high degree of undecideds/third party support closely mirrors that of the 2016 election, when Clinton was leading Trump 41% to 37.7%, a 3.3 point difference, with 21.3% of respondents undecided or supporting 3rd party candidates. Hell, even the number of poll respondents supporting the leading 3rd party candidates (Johnson in 2016 and RFK in 2024) are extremely similar at 9.3% and 9% respectively on July 16th. It's worth noting that in the end, Johnson only brought home 3.28% and 3rd party candidates altogether captured just 5.73% of votes cast.

It's also probably worth noting that Trump's top share of the vote in national polling in 2024 has been 43.1% (on March 29th) compared with 45.6% on March 6, 2020 and 38.3% on June 8, 2016. Obviously the biggest difference from 2020 is that Biden is polling at just 40.1% compared with 50.3% on this day in 2020, but it is interesting that this support hasn't gone to Trump, it's gone to undecideds and RFK, which means those votes are arguably up for grabs and/or that many might reluctantly return to Biden if or when he becomes the nominee. How that ~17% share of 3rd party/undecideds break over the next few months will 100% decide the election's outcome.

What really struck me is these comments from a commenter to that post:

Again, I think this introduces a high degree of uncertainty that many aren't taking into account. Keep in mind, this is the exact same reason why the polls were so off in 2016.

By election day 2016, Trump was down by 3.9% nationally with 13.5% of poll respondents still undecided or supporting 3rd party candidates. Trump picked up 4.3% of them and Clinton 2.5%, bringing Clinton's popular vote margin down to just 2.1%, which wasn't enough to put her over the finish line.

And yet, we have models this cycle suggesting that Trump has a more than 80% chance of winning 3.5 months from election day, because he's up by a little over 2 points nationally with more than 17% undecided/3rd party.

Sure doesn't feel like many pollsters and pundits learned the right lessons from 2016.

That strikes me as good news for Biden or whoever winds up running against DJT. The daily analysis at The Hill currently has DJT with a 56% chance of winning, but that would probably increase if the assassination attempt gives him more sympathy and support. We won't know that for a few more days as polling starts to reflect what effect, if any, the deranged nutjob with a gun is going to have on the outcome.

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That subreddit posted a ranking of the top 277 polling sources, plus a slew of others below those at the top. What surprised me was that Gallup ranked 35th and Pew Research Center ranked 40th. The top 11 are shown below.

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The Atlantic published an opinion about the judge that dismissed the Mar-A-Lago case in Florida against DJT:

Judge Cannon Has Gotten It Completely Wrong

In dismissing the classified-documents case, she is ignoring both practical history and legal precedent

Judge Aileen Cannon, a Donald Trump appointee, has dismissed the criminal charges against the former president. On the merits, her opinion is a poor one, ignoring history and precedent. It will almost certainly be reversed on appeal. Even so, her actions will surely delay Trump’s trial and may even prevent it completely, should Trump return to power and dismiss the case before a verdict is reached. For these reasons alone, her decision is certainly notable.

But Cannon’s opinion is even more significant for what it says systematically about the American judiciary and its increasing hubris. Donald Trump is famous for saying that he “alone can fix” the nation. Judges now routinely say that they “alone” know what the law is or should be. Cannon is just the latest, perhaps most egregious, example.

The legal issue in question was the validity of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s appointment by the attorney general. Cannon determined that the appointment was invalid because, in her view, no statutory authority existed for the attorney general to create such an officer. According to her, Smith was an “inferior officer” whose appointment could be approved only if there was specific statutory authority; absent that authority (as she characterized it), the appointment was unconstitutional.

One could write a volume about how wrong Cannon’s analysis is, and no doubt many will do so (including Smith on his inevitable appeal to the Eleventh Circuit). On the statutory merits, for example, the law allows the “Attorney General [to] appoint officials … to detect and prosecute crimes against the United States [and] to conduct such other investigations regarding official matters under the control of the Department of Justice and the Department of State as may be directed by the Attorney General.” This clear language is discarded by Cannon on the borderline-frivolous ground that Smith is sometimes called an “officer” of the Justice Department rather than an “official.”

As to precedent, during the investigation of Richard Nixon, the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged the power of the attorney general: “Under the authority of Art. II, § 2, Congress has vested in the Attorney General the power to conduct the criminal litigation of the United States Government … It has also vested in him the power to appoint subordinate officers to assist him in the discharge of his duties.”

Cannon casually tosses that off as dicta—statements of the Court not necessary to the Court’s decision. She’s wrong; the special prosecutor’s authority to subpoena Nixon was at issue, and the authority was dependent on prosecutors’ very existence. But even if she were correct, it takes significant hubris to disregard the Supreme Court when you are a lower-court judge.

Maybe what Cannon did has little or nothing to do with hubris. With hubris, you don’t realize your own failings. But in my humble opinion, Cannon knows exactly what she is doing. She consistently throws out existing precedent whenever it serves Trump. She has an agenda to delay, delay delay. When the law or precedent is against that agenda, she rules against against it. 

Cannon used the Mar-A-Lago stolen documents case to block other judges from scheduling proceedings in other Trump cases. That slowed everything by months. Maybe she wants to be removed from the case because she does not have the experience to actually try it, but that imputes good faith. I do not believe she governs** in good faith. Maybe she tread water until it was a good time for her to do something that would get her removed in a way that was good for her and DJT. But at this point, I am unsure if she will be removed from the case or whether it will even matter. If DJT is re-elected he will order the DoJ to drop the case about as soon as he is sworn into office. That will be the end of it.

** I used govern intentionally, instead of judging. She is a radical authoritarian Republican partisan, not a judge.